Fall 2013, Volume 15

Poetry by Christopher Buckley

There is something

to be said for the little civic parks
of Paris, especially the one where we sat
waiting for the grand, grey, Musee Marmottan                
to open so we might admire the Monet’s
and Berthe Morisot’s. . . .
                                       Just off
the Chaussée de la Muette, a bench entirely
to ourselves, one old gent on his rounds
offering a bonjour, though we were clearly tourists
with our small boxes from the patisserie
tied with paper ribbon, each holding
a square of pizza festooned with roasted garlic,
tomato and local fromage, the thin cardboard
emblazoned with the red flower of the shop,
and the tissue paper, wrapping the slices,
far too precious to toss into the trash.
The Chablis-colored sun worked through
the boughs of ash, chestnut, and beech,
sifted comfortably down, and stippled the green
August lawns.
                  It was a morning back before
the Euro, when the French still had the most
elaborate money in the world—the famous
faces and fantastic hats, the flourishes
in crimson, purple, gold—which you happily
handed over in the café or boulangerie,
at the entrance to the museum where
you’d come for some portion of faith
to be restored by a lost world, extended
by paintings that held the green sea-coast light,
the scumble of zinc-colored cloud,
the sepia air around the Tracadero
as the century turned, where its few visitors
found the small glory of their moment
in a glaze that proclaimed the currency
of God’s thought flooding through
the Parc du Ranelaugh, from where you’d just come,
sitting by the statue of La Fontaine
reciting his fable to a fox, for the next
few hundred years . . . .   And you
were there somewhere near middle age,
so much, you were sure, still promised,
suspended there on the ordinary
shoulders of the light, where you still thought
you knew where you were going . . . .

What Goes Around . . .

Springfield, Missouri, tail-end
of the ‘40s—I was 1 & ½ and
my mother had given me
a bit of Zwiebach to teeth on. 
Father worked nights
in radio, reading the news,
spinning Sinatra, June Christy,
Peggy Lee—so he slept
past noon.  When a crust
wedged in my throat,
my mother tried to hook it out
with her finger, but no dice.
My lips turning blue, she ran
with me to the bedroom where
my father tried something
he’d just read about in the paper—
grabbing me by the heels,
he held me upside down
over the bed then, head-first,
bounced me down on it,
and, it worked, dislodging
the edge of toast which I spat out,
catching my breath to shriek
like an alley cat.
                        My father
effected a high middle class moral
veneer—shined his wingtips,
filed his nails, wore knit ties
and starched shirts, never swore—
not even a Thank God when
I finally grabbed some air
and yowled.  Officially,
he was a Catholic, though I never
saw him set foot in church. 
He believed in something
like a divine cosmic corporation
whose board of directors was wise
enough to recognize his talent
and innate qualities and chose him
to star in his own broadcasts,
sending a melodious baritone
out over the waves of air. . . .
He never saw me coming—
long term obligation, financial
burden, loss of sleep,
a stage to share with anyone
else.
    Growing up, I was troubled
with hay fever, allergies,
and asthma-bronchitis . . .
then 60 years later, my wife
shook me awake one night
saying I wasn’t breathing. 
And before the neurologist
could fit me up with apparatus
for the apnea, my heart almost
screeched to a halt one night
from lack of oxygen;
the cardiologist told me this
as he read the print-out
from the pace maker implanted
two years previous—the defibrillator
was charging, ready to zap me
back into rhythm, he said, when
somehow, I’d corrected the pattern
on my own?
         Turns out I’d jumped
up in bed on all fours, breaking
from a dream in which I was choking . . .
head down, coughing, I thought
for a second something was caught
in my throat until I was awake
and drawing some deep breaths . . .
something you should not have to
remember you have to do, but
not something, in all cases, you can
do entirely on your own.

 

 

BIO: Christopher Buckley’s 20th book of poetry, Back Room at the Philosophers’ Club is due in spring 2014 from Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press. With Gary Young he has edited, Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, 2008, and One For the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form, from Lynx House Press, 2012.

He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing, four Pushcart Prizes and was awarded the James Dickey Prize for 2008 from Five Points Magazine, the William Stafford Prize in Poetry for 2012 from Rosebud, and is the 2013 winner of the Campbell Corner Poetry Contest. He is the editor of the poetry journal Miramar.